Every summer our family takes a two week vacation in August. By and large these vacations have included camping in National Parks. We have been out West, we have been out East, we have been up North. However, all but one of these trips have been car camping adventures. Our family is very experienced with car camping in all of its forms – quick weekend trips to Indiana Dunes National Park, primitive camping at Echo Lake in Dinosaur National Monument, busy, noisy camping near Bar Harbor at Acadia National Park, all the way to camping out of suitcases while driving the entire perimeter of Iceland.
We are car camping pros.
Last summer was our first backpacking adventure at Pictured Rock National Lakeshore in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I mentioned in a previous post that we threw together what we had at home and left. A COVID cancelled trip to London and Paris left us scrambling for something else to do. Matthew and I didn’t bring a sleeping bag for the first few nights as space in our packs was precious. Lightweight wasn’t a luxury we had. We have some great backpacking gear, but not enough. And car camping gear is heavy!
So fast forward to this summer. We had a tentative rescheduled trip to Ireland booked for August. But without our children having been vaccinated we decided to have another COVID cancellation. Instead we are heading BACK to Pictured Rocks to thru hike the 42 miles in that park. We are then heading over to Isle Royale in Lake Superior. We will take a ferry to the island and spend 5 or 6 days tootling around the island with our packs, looking for moose, eagles, and grey wolves.
We are crazy excited.
I kept calling this our Shakedown Hike. A shakedown hike is a hike you take to fine-tune your gear. What works? What doesn’t? What’s too heavy? What’s unnecessary? What are you missing?
You figure out if you’re too hot or too cold at night. If you tend to overpack food, or cut it too close.
In the backpacking community they say you pack your fears. And when you do a true shakedown hike you realize what you are overpacking so you can face those fears, be more realistic, and cut out that weight.
I’m pretty sure I know several of my fears. Several! Blister care, wound care, medications, clean clothes for town, cleanliness, sleeping cold. Phew. Just that list alone feels heavy.
But, ours won’t be a shakedown hike…because we don’t have the gear to shakedown.
Matthew applied for a large grant for his sabbatical. If we receive the grant, we will have a wonderfully big budget for the Appalachian Trail. We can buy the gear we want – the light sleeping bags and pads. The fancy stove and expensive shoes. We’ll have money for lightweight backpacking meals.
BUT, we won’t find out about that grant until after our trip in August.
So, we’ll have a quasi-shakedown this summer. We’re aiming to upgrade some of our gear (even if it is just temporarily for this summer). A bigger pack for our youngest, possibly a new sleeping bag or two, a vacuum sealer and DIY pouch koozies. Stuff like that.
Because the thing is, car camping gear is *heavy*!! Our tent probably weighs 8 pounds. It’s big enough for all 4 of us, our luggage, and floor space to WALK, without our heads touching the top of the tent. Our sleeping bags take up an entire plastic tote – my vintage Eddie Bauer down bag is INCREDIBLE, but gigantic.
We’ll have to be creative again this summer. But these hikes, while amazing, won’t be a shakedown hike.
I have a sneaking suspicion that our ‘shakedown hike’ is going to be the first hundred-ish miles of the AT. And I’m guess that those miles are going to be some heavy miles.
